There are problems, of course, with a road trip of this nature. It takes a lot of driving, GPS planning, reserving rooms, checking in and out of hotels, stopping for food and gas.

And that's before I get to stop to take notes and pictures at the historic sites I'm trying to visit. That's also before I get to go back to my room to write a short essay, select, crop and edit a few photos, create a new page for this website, and let you know that it's ready for viewing, mostly through Facebook.

But that's not the rough side of the road! Are you kidding? I live for this!

The rough side is getting back to my room, and hearing from self-loathing Latinos who think I should be writing about "the Spanish genocide."

The comments demonstrate immense ignorance, but they are very discouraging. Here I am, busting my butt to show Latinos that they have many reasons to be proud of their Spanish heritage in the United States, only to hear from Latinos who are ashamed of it.

If you follow my entries on the HiddenHispanicHeritage FB page, or in other group pages that are followed by pro-Spain people, you probably have not seen any of these comments. But when I post my entries on other Latin/Hispanic group pages where apparently some people have been swayed by The Black Legend, I get responses

I'm not Spanish. But if I were, I would be worried about being blamed for "the genocide."

they make no difference between what happened in Central and South America in the 1500s to what happened in California two centuries later. To them, based mostly on ignorance, it was all a "genocide."

Regardless of what sites I visit and photograph, clearly showing that there is no genocide in their history, I get a comment from someone who feels the (totally uninformed) responsibility to remind me to mention the genocide. It is